Background We’ve been hearing a lot of good feedback on the recently released update to the Entity Framework in .NET 4. This release marks a significant advancement from the first release that shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1. I’m not going to...

Visual Studio 2010 has a new feature, Embed Interop Types , that can simplify application deployment and solve those pesky issues that can arise when using COM Interop and Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). If you’ve ever had to ship multiple versions...

A common problem that one often runs into with XML literals and the LINQ to XML API is duplicate XML namespaces. Consider the following example. The code imports a default XML namespace - “hello”. Code: Imports < xmlns = " hello " >...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus) It’s been a while since I wrote one of these XML cookbook entries. Here’s some info on a common problem: Really big XML files. I’m going to show you two things...

One of the common use-cases of XML literals is creating HTML. However, HTML entities cannot be used in XML literals since LINQ to XML directly supports only the Data type definitions (DTD) defined in the XML 1.0 spec. You can read more about it here ...

I’ve written about collection initializers on my blog before , but I thought I’d catch up with the VB Team to tell me more about how they really work. In this interview Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB Compiler team, shows us a couple of new language...

It was a very exciting time this week, with the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. On April 12th, 5 launch events took place around the world in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, London and Las Vegas. The video from Bob Muglia’s VS 2010 Launch keynote...

Along with all the new goodies that we released yesterday as part of Visual Studio 2010, one additional thing we did yesterday as well is release an update to the popular interopforms toolkit. This update brings VS 2010 (and VS 2008!) support to the toolkit...

Crystal Reports has been a part of Visual Basic since 1993, and a part of Visual Studio since its first release in 2002. Crystal Reports has been a very successful component of these products. With the release of Visual Studio 2010, SAP and Microsoft...

The implicit line continuation feature in Visual Basic 2010 provided an opportunity to improve the code editing experience in XML literals embedded expressions. In Visual Studio 2008, pressing Enter inside an embedded expression would result in the cursor...

One of the really fun things about being associated with the Visual Basic team is getting to see all of the varied usages to which our customers put it. From enterprise software to games, our customer base covers a wide range. The most fun to see, however...

Today we revamped some of the Visual Basic Developer Center Learn pages with more content that allows you to pivot on more fine-grained topics and tasks related to Visual Basic programming. We’ve started with the Introductory Topics and Language Syntax...

Visual Studio 2010 is almost out the door. Now is a good time to look back at what we didn't get into the language in this release, but would have wanted to, and so will consider for future releases. Over the coming weeks, each day, I'll blog on blogs...

One of the overlooked or simply misunderstood features of the VB language is calling a function which has a ByRef parameter.  Most languages support only a single method of passing parameters by reference [1], that is the scenarios directly supported...

A while back, I remember being asked if there was a simple way to expose a source XML document as an object with properties. That is, if the root XML element had a child element <Name>Doug</Name> , then the object would have a Name property...

“Oh, no!” I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!” Well, I do like the game, to be sure. But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic, of course)....

By now you've likely heard about the major new features coming in VB 2010, but there's also a number of smaller additions in the language and IDE that might not be as readily noticeable. "Hidden Gems" will be a multi-part series where we'll explore some...

This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J . Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one...

What’s wrong with the following WPF code? Class Window1 Sub OK_Click(sender As Object , e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles OK.Click MsgBox( "Button Clicked" ) End Sub End Class < Window x : Class ="Window1" xmlns ="http...

In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. J Code for the controls (continued) The Title TextBox When the title changes,...

Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts ( here and here ) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model. The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always...

In yesterday’s post we saw that the use of the wrong comparison operator with Nothing in an If block can lead to surprising results. Let’s look at a slightly different case today: Dim x As Integer = Nothing If x = Nothing Then MsgBox( ...

Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them. The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try...

We’ve started two new “How Do I” videos series on the Visual Basic Developer Center . More to come, but here’s the latest!

There were a lot of Microsoft announcements that happened yesterday! Many of these happened during Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the SharePoint Developers Conference ( Video , Twitter ). Here is the list: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and compatible versions...